As a result of increased interest in digital collectibles sparked by top-line NFT replicas, the total number of bitcoin ordinals has already surpassed 550,000.
According to a study published by Dune Analytics, the total daily transaction costs for minting bitcoin ordinal inscriptions hit a new all-time high on March 23 at 9.28 BTC, equivalent to around $257,460.
About $3.3 million in transaction fees have been paid since the start of the ordinals project in January 2023, according to the study. These payments were paid to store photos, text, and even video games on the original blockchain.
The increase can be attributed, in a significant part, to Bitcoin Apes, a variant of the popular BAYC NFT collection that is being copied on the Bitcoin network.
How bitcoin apes work
A pseudonymous NFT historian, Leonidas, claims that Bitcoin Apes follows the same reasoning as Bitcoin Punks, which states that the first perfect-byte image of a bored ape signing up is the real one. 8,397 bitcoin apes have already signed up.
Once minted, almost a million dollars will have been spent enrolling the 10,000 identical duplicates of the BAYC photos on the Bitcoin blockchain.
According to Leonidas, the bitcoin blockchain now has nearly 1 gigabyte of monkey photos out of 466 gigabytes of data.
In a weird sense, Leonidas said that this is incredibly useful for bitcoin. According to Leonidas, every additional transaction fee paid to record these apes contributes to the security of the bitcoin network. This gives miners a new stream of money to increase block rewards.
According to Leonidas, initiatives like Bitcoin Apes could answer the age-old dilemma of what to do when bitcoin’s default block rewards inevitably hit zero in 2140.
Even if JPEG files are gaining popularity on the Bitcoin network, Dune claims that most ordinal inscriptions are still written in text form.
Leonidas says the bitcoin apes prove that the culture of one of the most famous NFT collections inevitably spills over to other blockchains.
Should you worry about duplicates?
Some BAYC members are concerned that duplicates of their NFTs could be made and traded on the bitcoin network. But Leonidas thinks it’s foolish to worry about things like that.
Leonidas explains that “blockchains address the issue of provenance of digital art,” clarifying that only legitimate BAYC holders can access the original, boring apes.
According to him, this is simply another spinoff effort from a famous PFP collection, ultimately diluting the value of the original PFP collection for its rightful holders.
The price of bitcoin apes is continuously rising despite having sparked discussions in the midst of its introduction. Still, BAYC NFT holders may not be willing to pay to enroll their digital treasures in bitcoin.
